How Can Museums Respectfully Engage with their Looted Objects?
On the left, tiles taken from South Asia. On the right is a tombstone of a Muslim grave from Andalus, Spain. Taken by Lina in Spring 2022.
When visiting the Met earlier this year, I was especially interested in the Islamic art exhibitions. As I wandered through, trailing from South Asia to Ottoman Anatolia to Damascus, I was on the one hand in awe of how the Met had such a wide variety of items from these places, but on the other hand, distraught and angered by the objects on display. There was a whole room from Damascus that you could peer into! Arches, doors, tiles—all on display, but from where were they taken? How did colonizers pick up a doorway and bring it to the museum? At one point, I came across tombstones on the wall. To take a tombstone from a grave and put it on display as if it’s a relic of conquest was horrific. How much better would the experience have been if there was a proper description of the tombstone, grounded in an analysis that wasn’t a Western-oriented display of loot and stolen objects? Or better yet, if it wasn’t there in the first place?
Centering Objects’ Erased Histories
After that visit, I remember scrolling through TikTok and seeing someone I follow walk through the halls of the Victoria and Albert Museum explain the history of objects that were looted. I started thinking—how can museums incorporate objects’ erased histories while waiting for repatriation processes to take place? The following list is what resulted! As a note, I intend for this list to be a temporary solution for museums and cultural institutions—their main objective should always be repatriation (the process of returning stolen objects to their countries of origin).
Ensure object labels aren’t framed by Western history or historical analysis.
This one is simple. Museums should prioritize incorporating expertise from people who are not operating through a Western-centric or Euro-centric frame. Descriptions on object labels should explain what the object is, how it was acquired—and be explicit here, explaining if the object was stolen—and the process for repatriation for that object. The latter could be in terms of a timeline of repatriation, steps the museum is taking towards repatriation, or what the calls for repatriation look like.
Create an app that visitors can use while navigating exhibitions to uncover alternate histories for stolen objects.
This ask is inspired by Vice’s collaboration with Dentsu Webchutney, an Indian creative agency, which is an unfiltered history tour that offers insight into ten items at the British Museum. Artifacts featured in the tour include the Hoa Hakananai from Rapa Nui, Jamaica’s Birdman, China’s Summer Palace, Australia’s Gweagal Shield, India’s Amaravati Marbles, Iraq’s Ashurbanipal, Nigeria’s Benin Bronzes, and Ghana’s Akam Drum. There is a podcast attached to the effort that features experts from the countries the objects were taken from.
Museums should create an app inspired by Vice’s app that would allow patrons to view alternate histories–histories that aren’t framed by Western thought, histories that have been actively erased, or even histories that have been forgotten. The app could link objects scanned to articles, scholarly publications, and other material. An app would be helpful for museum exhibitions that are not easily changeable.
Conduct more evaluations that focus on understanding visitors’ perspectives on looted objects.
When doing research on repatriation of museum objects personally and professionally, I have realized that although there is much research, publications, and public pressure for repatriation, there is still not much formalized study or research on how visitors interact with objects that have violent histories, if those histories are made clear (although Kera Collective recently conducted an evaluation of an exhibition at the Penn Museum that directly explored the colonial provenance of the featured objects). I would love to see more of this in my future work as someone in the museum evaluation field.
Repatriation, or Grappling with Imperialism
The legacies of the most famous and prestigious museums and cultural institutions are weaved by a common thread—that of looted and stolen objects. Stolen objects form the frame of Western museums, telling a story of colonialism, violence, and imperialism, as relics from the colonized world stand in the theater of empire. In this New York Times article, they quote a German broadcaster at the Deutsche Welle, a news publication, who said that if repatriation was successful, it would “eventually empty museums and galleries in Western countries.” If museums and galleries are empty because they have rightfully returned looted objects, then they must simply grapple with it! Former colonies are still dealing with the repercussions of colonization, and Western countries should not be able to house objects as relics from their imperial past.
Repatriation is an ongoing process that requires a willingness of institutions to grapple with pasts rooted in imperialism and take action to move beyond these violent pasts. Activists, academics, and average people of the colonized world have urged Western museums and cultural institutions to return stolen objects, from tombstones to diamonds to arches to statues to structures of deities (see this recent Last Week Tonight with John Oliver episode on the topic). Although repatriation can happen, such as the recent Smithsonian return of their Benin bronzes to Nigeria, it is a long and hard process.
Overall, museums have not an option, but an obligation to look into objects from the colonized world. Although repatriation can be arduous, the ideas I’ve shared in this post can showcase a willingness to join the conversation in a progressive way. I understand that this is a small list for now, and I hope to add more creative ideas about how museums can acknowledge the loot they house as I continue on my journey in museums.
